The present invention relates to a laminated material containing at least one layer of a thermoplastic, wherein the laminated material has latent inherent delamination potential, and to a process for carrying out the delamination.
Thermoplastics are used in industry for a very wide range of purposes. Particularly, thermoplastics are used frequently and in an extremely large amount in the direct and indirect packaging sector for various purposes, because they have advantageous mechanical and physical properties, because they can be readily molded by automatic processing machines, and especially because they can easily be given a visual image by coloring, printing, and/or metallization. The visual image is appealing in a particularly pleasant manner to people's aesthetic sensitivity and creates the impression of high quality for the end users in accordance with the intention of the manufacturers and suppliers.
Owing to the extremely extensive use of such thermoplastics, the manufacturers, the processors, and the end users accumulate relatively large amounts of trimmed materials or residual materials which cannot be completely recycled to the production process or to further processing. Since plastics are in some cases also combined with other materials, such as plastics of different types, paper, board, metal, and/or printing inks, to give laminated structures, such recycling is especially difficult. Such trimmed materials or residual materials, which are commonly also referred to as potential recycling material, must be collected and then be separated into materials of the same type by expensive methods, which in practice cannot always be performed completely and cannot be carried out routinely in fully automatic plants.